Second in series on green homes in Wayland

This is the second in a series of articles spotlighting houses that will be featured as part of Wayland’s Earth Day celebration on April 27 and 28. This week we look at 13 Rice Spring Lane.

Staff reports

Note: This is the second in a series of articles spotlighting houses that will be featured as part of Wayland’s Earth Day celebration on April 27 and 28. This week we look at 13 Rice Spring Lane.

When they were looking to relocate from Brookline in 2008, owners Satrajit Ghosh and Kaat Vander Straeten only looked in Wayland. They loved the schools and the leafy streets, the ponds and waterways, and the house that, by a stroke of luck, they ended up buying.

Ghosh is an MIT scientist who studies the brain. He is also handy with tools and often helps his wife with projects, such as building a solar cooker out of an old satellite dish and bending metal conduit to create the rib cage of a hoop house.

“We love building things ourselves, but some things we delegate,” says Ghosh.

He has in mind their 5-kilowatt solar PV system, which went up in 2011, the year before Solarize began in Wayland (the program for which Vander Straeten became the solar coach).

The system had been sized to cover 80 percent of their electricity consumption, but they worked to decrease that even further and ended up overproducing (they produced 5,288 kilowatt hours and consumed 5,031 kilowatt hours).

“It became a fun game, a race against ourselves, and nothing much was sacrificed, really,” says Vander Straeten, a writer and activist.

The household is equally careful about water usage and making trash. As for oil for space heating and hot water, when they moved in, they took the 0 percent interest MassSave loan to replace the antique furnace with an ultra-efficient boiler. They continued to chip away at their oil consumption, and took another big step by adding a solar hot water system, which went up in February 2013.

These are just some of the elements they will show during their open house on Earth Day. There will also be tours of the large “organic” vegetable garden and the 20-foot-by-10-foot hoop house for season extension, plus the compost and rainwater catchment systems.

If the weather cooperates, Vander Straeten will also do a “hive opening” of her three beehives. Vander Straeten has been a beekeeper for four years and founded Wayland’s BEElieve group “for beekeepers and bee friends” in 2011. Last year the couple harvested 70 pounds of honey, with a honey extractor that was, it goes without saying, homemade.

Around Earth Day visitors might also see the couple hard at work. This year’s big project is landscaping the front of their property – installing a small fish pond-wetland-water catchment, a tiny orchard, and a system of swales and Hugelkultur for fruit trees and berries on a slope.

“If you’re curious about what a ‘Hugelswale’ is, you’ll just have to come and see,” says Vander Straeten. “But in brief, what we try to do here is permaculture, a way of providing for as many of our needs as possible while working with, not against nature.”

Vander Straeten also designed the permaculture demonstration garden in the Hannah Williams Playground, for which she hopes to gather more volunteers.

“We do a lot of big projects, but we don’t ignore the little things, like line drying our laundry, shopping at Wayland’s fabulous Farmers’ Market, and simply turning off the lights if we’re not in the room. The big systems, you put them in and forget about them. It’s the little, daily things that make the culture of so-called green living.”

Kaat Vander Straeten is now a full-time “local activist.” She co-founded Transition Wayland in 2010, wanting to work on her community’s resilience and finding a positive model of outreach and work in the Transition Movement. Before that she joined the Green Team.

“It was in that equally wonderful group of people that I found my public voice, so to speak,” she says. “I never was a joiner and didn’t think I could ‘speak out.’ I am proud to be part of he work the Green Team does in the schools.”

“It would be great if just our neighbors came. They’re coming by our house all the time and must be wondering,” adds Vander Straeten. “I’d love to share it with them. It’s not about changing other people’s ways – it used to be, but no longer. Now it’s simply about showing that an alternative way of life need not be outlandish and is very rewarding. Everyone is welcome to come and share in the fun.”

Earth Day 2013 is organized by Transition Wayland and the Wayland Schools PTO Green Team (www.waylandgreenteam.org). You can find more information about Earth Day 2013, as well as a map and schedule of the open houses, by going online (www.transitionwayland.org).

If you would like to host your own open house, send us an email (info@transitionwayland.org).